Bite Me: Oxford Order of the Undead Book 1: (A Vampire Mafia Rom-Com) by Katherine Avery

Author:Katherine Avery [Avery, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Muonic Press
Published: 2024-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

Maeve Blue. The Upper Reading Room, The Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

Imay be barking up the wrong tree, but I’m relatively certain most of these authors don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. There’s so much contradicting data. I call it ‘data’ but I think it’s mostly supposition. We’ve got everything from tales of the undead rising from the grave to feast on the blood of the living, to flesh eaters, flesh-avoidant vamps, bird-like beings who subsist on the blood of newborns, and everything inbetween.

They love the sun, they hate the sun. They’re allergic to garlic, they bathe in the stuff. They can be felled with a silver bullet or a stake to the heart or, as Alice pointed out, a scythe to the neck. They’re monstrous, scheming, soul-suckers and/or misunderstood romantics who only want to be left alone in their ageing castles, walls crumbling into the turbulent ocean below. They don’t age, in some accounts they don’t die, but they do feast, reveling in the fragility of human life.

I move a book from one stack to the next, flipping open a treatise on the cultural impact of the vampire trope. Max Shrek’s Nosferatu was ghoulish, whereas Bella Lugosi’s Dracula was a romantic icon, and David Bowie’s rapidly ageing vampire supposedly ranks as one of the sexiest movies ever made about death and dying.

I jot a note to myself: ‘make list of movies.’ This author has done me the favour of listing their sources so I can make a copy of the endnotes. Though do I really think there’ll be a revelation there? More like what my grandmother would call ‘thinly veiled porn,’ but she thought Buffy was pornographic, so there’s that. Anything more than chaste kissing and I’d be sent from the TV room, which only made it all the more alluring.

At least my mother was more liberal when it came to what I was allowed to read or watch. She watched Twilight with me, when I was going through my vampire phase.

My heart shudders in my chest. I haven’t thought about ‘my vampire phase’ for an age. The thought shimmers, almost out of reach, a mirage in a desert, the thoughts slipping away from me as I try to chase them down.

I dig my nails into my palms. “Remember.”

The woman at the desk next to me shushes me without looking up from her book. She has to be a foreign student. English people don’t shush each other. They might tut silently to themselves or roll their eyes, but nothing so vulgar or forbidden as making their feelings known.

I open yet another tome, searching for clues. Eventually the psychologists start pitching in, of course, positing that vampiric lore is merely a collection of tales of narcissism, explorations of power and longevity, studies of unchecked aggression, missives on the search for eternal life, and of course, sex.

The hours tick by. I ignore the deep rumble in my gut and power on, submitting book and article requests on the library’s app and digging deeper and deeper into the literature.

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